Letters I'll Never Send, or An American Crocodile
by Briana Rose
Summary: Remus writes Tonks a letter while underground: Anyway I suppose I’m getting off on a tangent, though I suppose you can’t go off on a tangent if you didn’t know where you were to begin with.


_This was the prompt for this one:_

_"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." - Anne Bradstreet_

**Letters I'll Never Send; or, An American Crocodile**

On bad days Remus Lupin liked to go to his bunk underground among Greyback's pack and read the papers to find a story that made him feel better that he was reading it in a bunk underground among Greyback's pack. One day the story came in one of the Muggle newspapers that he picked up on the sidewalk. A young boy, it said, in a small Florida school had sustained "grievous bodily injuries" after skiving his Algebra class by hiding in the boiler room, where a crocodile of the American breed (_Crocodylus acutus_, the article had said, which struck Remus as a bit picayune) had been in repose. How it had got inside the building the Muggles weren't exactly sure, but it had been enough to get the school closed for the day….

So, really, it could've been _much_ worse for him, he reflected. The poor Muggle boy had only been trying to skive his classes and had found himself maimed. (The same sort of thing had happened to James in their fourth year, though admittedly they had never been quite sure _what_ had attacked him, as it had been unaccountably dark for a secret passage towards the seventh floor.) And, Remus thought, he couldn't have it much worse than the crocodile did at that moment. It had probably been shot or drugged and sent in a box to a zoo where it would stay in a slightly bigger box for the rest of its life. It would never see its old…hole, or whatever it was crocodiles lived in, among the marshy depths of the Everglades, in a mangrove tree….

Pleasant thoughts of crocodiles and giant mangroves, giant floating tree islands blooming with life, in lovely and warm parts of the world floated through Remus' mind, so when he saw one of his fellow werewolves come down through the manhole with dusty bits of white on his shoulders, Remus sat straight up.

"It's snowing?" he asked incredulously.

"Yep."

"_Again_? It's the third of April, how much more could it _possibly_ snow?"

"Dunno, mate. Check for yourself, why don't you."

Remus did, climbing the ladder and sticking his head into the cold night air. Fluffy, deceptively beautiful flakes were falling to the earth. There was almost an inch so far and it did not seem to be letting up.

"Fuck," said Remus, part of his mind still on the floating tree island in a hot and muggy place. "For God's sake, it's _April third_."

He went back underground, which, while warmer, had the stuffy air that reminded him of a dungeon. That was what bothered him more than the cold, that clammy suffocating feeling you always got in winter, a feeling that, this year, was hanging around well into springtime. He sighed and went back to his bunk. On a (rather dangerous) impulse he started writing a letter.

"Dear Tonks," it began. He paused for a long while before going on.

"I hope you're well. Of course, I always say that to you the few times I see you and you always tell me that you're not, but I still hope that you will think otherwise when you get this. I'm, to put it bluntly, not well; all melancholy and nastily introspective and rather cold, which is why I'm writing you letters I'll never send. I do that with a lot of letters, mostly as a therapeutic exercise, I'm sure you understand (or _would_ understand, more aptly). Unfortunately sometimes, on a whim, I'll actually send the letters to the person they're originally intended for, oftentimes with disastrous results.

"Anyway, I haven't seen you much since Christmas. I've _heard_ about you from Molly and the like. My own mother never saw much use in laying the guilt on me, so it's nice to finally get a taste of it from somewhere and see what I've been missing out on. Molly says you 'don't look well,' which I suppose means you still can't change your appearance. I remember, last summer, when I bought you dinner that one night, and you showed me the only thing that you had managed to change, that tiny streak of pink on the underside of your hair. I remember thinking how wispy and faint it was and wondering if saying it was pink wasn't being a bit optimistic.

"Anyway; I suppose I'm getting off on a tangent, though I suppose you can't go off on a tangent if you didn't know where you were to begin with. The point is, though, that I'm writing this letter because I hope that the pink isn't white and faded anymore, because you deserve, I think, to have it so blindingly colorful that it sends Severus Snape into some sort of shock when he sees you. I understand that the likelihood of the two of us becoming good pen friends is rather slim after what I've said to you in the past year or so, but, as I said, I won't send this letter, so you'll never have to understand why it was important that I said what I said.

"Again: that's a tangent. A rather murky tangent. The bottom line, then: I do really hope you're well. And pink. Both at the same time.

"All the best,

"Remus Lupin."

He stared at the letter for awhile as the ink dried, skimming it and not really reading it. "Rubbish," he said to himself, threw it aside, and went to sleep.

That night he did not dream, as he would've hoped, of islands and crocodiles in the tropics. When he woke up early the next morning the whole world was still depressingly white. He decided to get up for a walk before the other werewolves woke up. He trudged through the snow (which made unpleasant squelching noises under his feet; it made him angrier with every step) until, somehow, he ended up in Diagon Alley looking for a post owl. Without thinking, he attached the letter to the owl's leg after paying the clerk three Knuts for its use. He stared after it as it flew away, then, after a moment of reflection, rather uselessly tried to chase after it. He only succeeded in slipping on the ice outside, which made him angrier. The owl was gone with the letter. As if making fun of him, the sun came out again. Remus cursed under his breath and went back to his underground hole before he would be missed.

THE END


End file.
